tttthink: On 9/10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld admitted the Pentagon couldn't account 2.3 trillion dollars. Then 9/11 happened and everyone forgot
AlterNet: 14 things you need to know about Joe Wilson
Lean Left: "Mr. Gorbachev, Build Up This Wall" - Jackass Rightwinger's cynical hypocrisy hits historic high
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attytood: College president honors "diversity" by naming center for Dick Cheney
It looks like Tom Ridge's lastest revelations in his book have given Keith a chance to say he was correct when he did his series on the Nexus of Politics and Terror. John Dean weighs in on the criminality of what Ridge has admitted to in his book. He thinks Ridge gave himself some wiggle room since he said he only believed the terrorist threat level was being manipulated for political reasons, and did not say he knew it to be a fact.
It's so nice to see all the dirty f@%#king hippies were right about this, huh? It will be interesting to watch the Villagers try to explain why they didn't report on something as plain as the noses on their faces back when this was going on. Other than Keith, I don't recall any of them speaking out about it other than to repeat the government propaganda. I'd also like someone to ask Tom Ridge why he didn't resign when he first knew this was happening.
(click here to see Mark's very revealing video about the phony terror alerts back in the Bush years)
This is a big deal because it's coming from the horse's mouth. Tom Ridge admits in his new book what we've known for a long time and what has been reported years ago.
Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election.
Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books.
"After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector," Ridge is quoting as writing in "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... And How We Can Be Safe Again."
Some of Bush's critics had repeatedly questioned whether the administration was using warnings of a possible attack to blunt the political damage from the unpopular Iraq war by shifting the debate to the broader "war on terrorism," which had wide popular appeal.
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He later publicly acknowledged that much of the information underpinning the new alert was three years old, stoking Bush critics' charges of political manipulation.Ridge also charges that he was often "blindsided" during daily morning briefings with Bush because the FBI withheld information from him, and says he was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings.
Here's what Ridge's book says:
Former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is releasing a book on September 1 titled, “The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again.” U.S. News’ Paul Bedard reports that, in the book, Ridge reveals that he considered resigning because he was urged to issue a politically-motivated security alert on the eve of Bush’s re-election:
Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
This was first reported way back when by the Washington Post in 2004:
The mixing of anti-terrorism policy with the 2004 presidential campaign is becoming destructive. It is creating a vicious cycle of hype, skepticism and mistrust that puts the country's security at risk.
The dangers of politicizing terrorism were clear in this month's announcement about potential attacks on financial centers in the New York area and in Washington. When Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge disclosed the threats on Aug. 1, he faced immediate skepticism about whether the intelligence was valid. Sadly, the Bush administration had helped create this climate of public suspicion by overusing its elaborate, color-coded system of terrorism warnings. After a terrorism advisory by Attorney General John Ashcroft last spring was pooh-poohed the same day by Ridge, some people wondered whether these warnings were being used for political effect.
Bush used the terror alerts to win the election against John Kerry and it's a breach of his oath of office as far as I'm concerned.
And don't forget about the release of the Osama Bin Laden tape right before the election. As we were getting closer to Nov. 4th, Kerry was picking up momentum before this happened.
On October 29, 2004, at 21:00 UTC, the Arab television network, Al Jazeera, broadcast excerpts from a videotape of Osama bin Laden addressing the people of the United States, in which he accepted responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks, condemns the Bush government's response to those attacks and presents those attacks as part of a campaign of revenge and deterrence motivated by his witnessing of the destruction in the Lebanese Civil War in 1982.
John Kerry admitted as much on MTP:
Senator John Kerry said on Sunday that the attacks of Sept. 11 were the "central deciding thing" in his contest with President Bush and that the release of an Osama bin Laden videotape the weekend before Election Day had effectively erased any hope he had of victory.
Ah, you've got to love these war mongering Republicans like Lindsey Graham, huh? Never found a war they didn't like. Not that I can say much better about way too many Democrats. Domestic spending to fix health care...the horror! We can't afford that. Money to go blow up some brown people on the other side of the world, hey, let those money coffers flow. We've got to stay safe from those turrists don't you know.
As The Political Carnival noted, Lindsey Graham just turned Don Rumsfeld's name into a verb. It's always so nice to see them admit screw ups after they've allowed America to go blow up both Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn't have any business invading either country IMO.
Schieffer: Sen. Graham, what about that? What about when we put our eye back on that area along the border? What's going to need to be done there, and how far do you think Congress is going to be willing to go?
Graham: Well, your question was what would you, what would Congress do if the President said we need more troops in Afghanistan. I'm one Republican that would support more troops in Afghanistan. I do believe, quite Frankly, I'll be shocked if more troops are not requested by our commanders. Afghanistan has deteriorated . In July of last year the President said, when he was a candidate for office that Afghanistan, not Iraq was the central battle in the war on terror.
I disagreed then because Iraq was hanging in the balance. Iraq is more stable. The President is right. Afghanistan is now the central battle front on the war on terror. That means more of everything. More troops, more political engagement, more economic engagement. Carl is right, our NATO allies need to send more troops. The Afghan army being doubled would be a $20 billion appropriation over five years.
America is now paying 90% of the Afghan army. NATO contributed $100 million when Gates passed the hat to help pay for the Afghan army, so I would urge our NATO allies to submit more troops, more funding and I'll be shocked if more troops are not needed. We must secure Afghanistan, and it is not secure now because we don't have enough troops.
(Robert McNamara - Every time he opened his mouth, doom flew out)
To anyone of a certain generation, the name Robert S. McNamara will probably evoke the same (or very similar) reactions as this generations Donald Rumsfeld does.
Anger, bitterness, rage, betrayal - simmering arrogance, wrongheadedness and simple belligerence. All over a war that, like Iraq, should not have existed in the first place. And yet it was McNamara's insistence we wage it, even to the point of deceit.
I remember his "Mea Culpa tour" of the 1990's, begging forgiveness for his wrongdoings and his errors - saying in fact, The Gulf of Tonkin incident may not have happened. And some 60,000 casualties and untold wounded later . . . .
But as Joseph N.Welch once told Joseph McCarthy: "Your forgiveness sir, will have to come from a power other than myself".
And so here is a Press Conference, typical of the McNamara era during the Vietnam War, from February 7, 1965 - as the escalation and casualties mount. As we sighed and waited for our draft notices to appear.
From the Cafferty File:
It’s been almost four months since former President Bush left office, and many would like to leave his administration in the past. But that may not be possible since there’s a constant dripping of information about what really went on during those eight years.
The latest comes by way of GQ Magazine, which has released a series of cover sheets for intelligence reports written for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon brass during the early days of the Iraq war.
They featured “triumphant, color images” like soldiers praying or in action or a tank at sunset along with Biblical passages. For example: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”
Besides the obvious question of appropriateness, what if these covers had leaked out at the time? The Muslim world could have interpreted the war as a religiously-driven battle against Islam. You think they were upset about Abu Ghraib?
But the general who thought up the covers told anyone that complained about them that his seniors, including Rumsfeld and President Bush, appreciated them. In fact, GQ says Rumsfeld hand-delivered many of these reports to President Bush.
The magazine suggests the mixing of Crusades-like messages with war imagery might not have been Rumsfeld’s style — but he likely saw it as a way to connect with the deeply religious President Bush.
This is just another in a growing list of questions, and just like torture and the reasons for invading Iraq, they don’t seem to be going away.
Here’s my question to you: Is a complete investigation of the Bush administration and the Iraq war becoming inevitable?
Via Frank Rich today:
This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.) What’s up with that?
As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
And speaking of Rumsfeld, Rich also mentions this:
In a highly unusual reversal, the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office has withdrawn a report it issued in January exonerating a Pentagon public relations program that made extensive use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.
Donald M. Horstman, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for policy and oversight, said in a memorandum released on Tuesday that the report was so riddled with flaws and inaccuracies that none of its conclusions could be relied upon. In addition to repudiating its own report, the inspector general’s office took the additional step of removing the report from its Web site.
(L-R: Donald Rumsfeld, Pres. Ford, Rumsfeld's Trusty Assistant Dick Cheney)
Back in 1969, Donald Rumsfeld went from being a member of Congress to becoming a political appointment of Nixon's to head the rather Orwellian sounding Office Of Economic Opportunity. It would seem to be reasonably harmless, but in 1970 Rumsfeld added Dick Cheney to the mix his assistant. Several different versions emerge as to what exactly Cheney's role was and how he got there. Like everything, it's shrouded in shadows and mystery. But suffice to say, things started changing shortly after.
Here is an interview with Rumsfeld on Face The Nation from December 7, 1969, a few months before the entrance of Cheney, but noteworthy for the fact that Rumsfeld never lost the gift for mangling a perfectly good sentence.
Time to push Congress into a full investigation of BushCo torture policies:
WASHINGTON — A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.
The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.
The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times; a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed the report at the time as “unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation.”
The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq — stripping detainees, placing them in “stress positions” or depriving them of sleep — originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations.
According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantánamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising “to get ‘tougher’ with detainee interrogations.” Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.
The report showed that Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization was cited by a United States military special-operations lawyer in Afghanistan as “an analogy and basis for use of these techniques,” and that, in February 2003, a special-operations unit in Iraq obtained a copy of the policy from Afghanistan “that included aggressive techniques, changed the letterhead, and adopted the policy verbatim.”
Months later, the report said, the interrogation officer in charge at Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of that policy “and submitted it, virtually unchanged, through her chain of command.” This ultimately led to authorization by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez of the use of stress positions, “sleep management” and military dogs to exploit detainees’ fears, the report said.
“The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots,” Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. “This report, in great detail, shows a paper trail going from that authorization” by Mr. Rumsfeld “to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq,” Mr. Levin said.
Dave N.: Suzanne Ito reports reaction from the Senate, including Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich:
In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse — such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan — to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a “few bad apples,” were simply false.
Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel for the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, offered a statement as well:
This report makes frighteningly clear that some of the darkest moments in our country’s recent past were choreographed at the highest levels of government… The people who were at the very top of the Bush administration and those at the top of the chain of command must be held accountable. Just as any other American would be investigated by a prosecutor for crimes committed, so must our government officials. We must ensure that our laws are impartially enforced against everyone.
(Can I just say "I told you so"?)
John Amato: See if you can throw a few bucks to my pal Marcy. She does an outstanding job.
January 26, 2009 CNN
In an interview Thursday with the AP, Vice President Cheney neatly summarized the failed Bush presidency. Comparing the financial meltdown and implosion of the American economy with the 9/11 attacks, Cheney insisted, "I don’t think anybody saw it coming." As it turns out, from 9/11, sectarian conflict in Iraq and the election of Hamas to the Bush recession and the drowning of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, the leading lights of the Bush administration claimed they never saw it coming. Call it the "Nobody Could've Predicted Presidency."
As ThinkProgress detailed, Cheney deflected blame for the calamity on Wall Street and the deepening recession by declaring, "nobody anywhere was smart enough to figure that out" and "I don’t know that anybody did." Then, Cheney magically converted failure into a virtue and ignorance into a shield in explaining away the Bush presidency:
"No, obviously, I wouldn’t have predicted that. On the other hand I wouldn’t have predicted 9/11, the global war on terror, the need to simultaneous run military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq or the near collapse of the financial system on a global basis, not just the U.S."
At every turn, of course, voices both inside and outside the government warned a Bush administration asleep at the switch.
It would be good to see them face charges for their torture policies. We can only hope the new administration feels the same. (h/t Avedon):
In early December, in a highly unusual move, a federal court in New York agreed to rehear a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft brought by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar. (Arar was a victim of the administration's extraordinary rendition program: he was seized by U.S. officials in 2002 while in transit through Kennedy Airport and deported to Syria, where he was tortured.) Then, on Dec. 15, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld by four Guantánamo detainees alleging abuse there—a reminder that the court, unlike the White House, will extend Constitutional protections to foreigners at Gitmo.
Finally, in the same week the Senate Armed Service Committee, led by Carl Levin and John McCain, released a blistering report specifically blaming key administration figures for prisoner mistreatment and interrogation techniques that broke the law. The bipartisan report reads like a brief for the prosecution—calling, for example, Rumsfeld's behavior a "direct cause" of abuse. Analysts say it gives a green light to prosecutors, and supplies them with political cover and factual ammunition. Administration officials, with a few exceptions, deny wrongdoing. Vice President Dick Cheney says there was nothing improper with U.S. interrogation techniques—"we don't do torture," he repeated in an ABC interview on Dec. 15. The government blamed the worst abuses, such as those at Abu Ghraib, on a few bad apples.
High-level charges, if they come, would be a first in U.S. history. "Traditionally we've caught some poor bastard down low and not gone up the chain," says Burt Neuborne, a constitutional expert and Supreme Court lawyer at NYU. Prosecutions may well be forestalled if Bush issues a blanket pardon in his final days, as Neuborne and many other experts now expect. (Some see Cheney's recent defiant-sounding admission of his own role in approving waterboarding as an attempt to force Bush's hand.)
Constitutionally, Bush could pardon everyone involved in formulating and executing the administration's interrogation techniques without providing specifics or naming names. And the pardon could apply to himself. Such a step, however, would seem like an admission of guilt and thus be politically awkward. Even if Bush takes it, civil suits for monetary damages could still proceed; such cases, though hard to win, are proliferating. Yet most legal scholars argue that a civil suit would not the best approach here. Neuborne calls it an "excessively lawyer-centric" strategy and says judges are extremely reluctant to award damages in such cases. Conservative legal experts like David Rifkin (who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations) argue that no accounting is necessary, since the worst interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, have already been abandoned and Obama is expected to make further changes.
Duncan Hunter went on Hardball and criticized the New York Times editorial on detainee abuse as "left wing rubbish". Janice Karpinski would disagree with Hunter's assertion that the blame for the abuse did not go all the way to the top.
December 18, 2008 News Corp
